Abstract
The picklock of political ecology: Everyday Environmentalism and the politics of nature
Manifestos are in vogue these days. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels staked their famous claim on the door of history, but recently even Bruno Latour has cracked the genre, writing a clever essay in support of the effort:
[A] manifesto might not be so useless at this point, making explicit (that is, manifest) a subtle but radical transformation in the definition of what it means to progress, that is, to process forward and meet new prospects. Not at a war cry for an avant-garde to move even further and faster ahead, but rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future. The nuance I want to outline is that between progress and progressive. It is as if we had to move from an idea of inevitable progress to one of tentative and precautionary progression. There is still a movement. Something is still going forward.
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If manifestos signal forward movement and cautious but courageous progress, then Everyday Environmentalism by Alex Loftus is the genre’s newest member. Structured as a Marxist’s user guide to key thinkers, the book makes a compelling argument for the philosophy of praxis, rooted in everyday life, as the basis for political and environmental struggles. Loftus provides no blueprint for 21st century environmentalism − indeed, his brief empirical vignettes raise more questions than they settle − but blueprints seem out of place in contemporary politics. As Latour notes, ‘the spirit of the age, if there is such a Zeitgeist, is rather that everything that had been taken for granted in the modernist grand narrative of Progress is fully reversible and that it is impossible to trust in the clear-sightedness of anyone − especially academics’. 2 In the spirit of regular folk, Everyday Environmentalism is less billy club and more Gramscian picklock: a tool to unlock the role of the ‘everyday’ in a messy world.
But even picklocks aren’t perfect. The book opens with a high-noon standoff between Marxist and posthumanist/actor-network theories − a ‘false antithesis’ that begs for fresh readings
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− but Loftus then misses opportunities to call truces among unexpected intellectual allies. For example, as Ian Shaw and I argue elsewhere, Marxist political ecology and Deleuzian-inspired approaches share a proclivity for process-based modes of explanation, in contrast to what we call object-oriented approaches.
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Everyday Environmentalism provides several examples. For Loftus, ‘the dialectical approach that Marx developed is a way of looking at the world that privileges process and relations over the forms in which they appear’.
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Such ‘forms’ (I’ll use the placeholder ‘objects’ instead) are derived from relations, which in turn mediate future relations. Loftus explains, using an example from South Africa:
In Inanda, as with any other built environment around the world, various technical and infrastructural accoutrements (taps, tankers, padlocks, buckets) mediate this interchange: their functioning, in turn depends on a set of institutional, political, and economic relationships.
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In this approach, relations are never fixed or immutable: they are supple, geographically and historically dependent, materially transformative, and constitutive of multiple futures (or ‘becomings’). And yet the relation is primary, while objects − taps and tankers, padlocks and buckets − are derivative or secondary. Deleuzian-inspired scholars such as Brian Massumi and Mark Bonta share a processual ontology, albeit with different vocabulary. For Massumi, ‘objects are derivative of process because “the reality of the world exceeds that of objects, for the simple reason that where objects are, there has also been their becoming”’. 7 Bonta similarly examines how things like protected forests and national parks are crystallized from global conservation discourses and initiatives. Potential synergies exist between both approaches, though such affinities remain unexplored in Everyday Environmentalism.
Why should this matter? To his credit, Loftus is less interested in a philosophy of the world − the speculative realism spearheaded by Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux − than a philosophy of human access to the world. And with good reason: in the daily efforts of shack-dwellers struggling for water, Loftus seeks to recover a truly democratic environmental politics, one that fights against the shocking inequalities of the world. But in this struggle, I wonder how objects of all stripes − corn and iron, bees and beavers, laborers and tools − fit together in the future composition of the Common. This puzzle − including questions of technology, materiality, and nonhumans − nips at the heels of Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, a source of inspiration for Everyday Environmentalism, but Loftus’ book remains curiously silent on the subject. 8 Or the object.
In weighing the impact of Everyday Environmentalism for geography and political ecology, three points stand out. First, Loftus locates the production of nature (and struggles over it) in the domain of life’s work − at the point of social reproduction − and not strictly on the shopfloor or picket line. Rather than Marxist business-as-usual − in which capitalocentric notions of ‘politics’ occur mainly at the site of production − the book extends feminist political economy in new directions, bringing Donna Haraway and Nancy Hartsock in creative tension with Henri Lefebvre and Georg Lukács. Through this doorway, the book makes its greatest impact on the Marxist canon and pioneers new concepts for the contested geographies of social reproduction.
Second, while the book makes an urgent case for democratizing technology, it punts the task into the hands of the ‘state’: a nebulous entity, hovering undefined in the text. This blind spot is not unique to Loftus: political ecology has long focused on capitalist impacts and transformation of the environment, often to the neglect of state theorization. But such blind spots ultimately leave the book − and its promise of activism − vulnerable to critique. For example, in considering water supply alternatives, Loftus criticizes the ‘hopeful promise’ of ‘intermediate technologies’ like household rainwater harvesting, which potentially leads residents ‘to a life of disease and misery’. 9 These claims directly contradict my own research − which find that urban dwellers often continue to harvest rain even after they connect to the municipal network 10 − but reflect similar perspectives found in other prominent texts, such as Karen Bakker’s Privatizing Water. Indeed, Bakker sets the table when she asserts, ‘recourse to the state is necessary if we are to supply urban water on an equitable and universal basis to all’. 11 Both books assume the ‘state’ as the best fix to problems of supply and access, and yet formal institutional mechanisms, power geometries, and state knowledge production remains unexplored and blithely concurrent with democratic ideals. For Loftus, ‘a kinder and more democratic production of nature [depends] on transforming capitalist relations’, 12 but this move fails to grapple with crucial questions of state power, the rule of experts, the historical co-production of liberal democracy, technology, and capitalism, or the variegated ways that ‘stateness’ is cultivated and contested. Working in Mexico City, for example, I find that the ‘state’ − embodied and shaped by the municipal grid − is not a straightforward answer to the lack of water provision; it, too, is part of the question that demands careful explication and explanation.
Finally, for a book that holds steady against the conceptual traps of external nature or mass produced revolution, at times the book soars into the ether, ignited by urgency and hope, fuelled by a low octane rage. Everyday Environmentalism is penned by a starry-eyed regular chap, who − on the cobblestone walk to his daughter’s school every morning − turns out to dream the same dream that Marx and Latour also share: the search for the Common. The book closes with a lovely quote by Andy Merrifield: ‘politics more than anything needs the magical touch of dream and desire, needs the shock of the poetic’. 13 Such romantic sentiment is refreshing. Politics needs a flotilla of justice-seekers, a parliament of the unelected, a raft of manifestos, a legion of dreamers. And Loftus is not the only one.